For the Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Portland The menu was designed as a bookmark for this series of short essays that accompanied the meal and defined each dish. Each course had a corresponding essay, allowing the eaters to reflect on their meal long after the food was consumed.
A WORD ON PLANETARY SCULPTURE: EATERS AS AGENTS OF SELECTION
The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club is a collection of foods, recipes and stories that point to the varied ways that humans sculpt the planet’s biosphere. In agriculture, sculpting the biosphere and steering evolution is commonplace. Animal and plant breeders have steered evolution for thousands of years. With a dramatic increase in the human population over the last century, the sum total of decisions that eaters make on a daily basis means that eaters exert increasingly intense selection pressures on the diversity, abundance and distribution of life on the planet.
Every time a food-secure eater chooses to eat one kind of food over another they make a small, downstream, but not insignificant selection pressure that privileges certain genomes to propagate on the planet.
Within our global civilization and global food system, eaters are agents of selection.
What preferences, constraints, biases or assumptions determine the genomes that comprise our food system? Which food system? How big is it? What role should individuals, communities, governments or businesses have in determining the genomes that make up our food systems and ecological systems?
To read the rest of the booklet download the pdf.
